— Mitch McConnell, who has been in a very tough race with Democratic candidate Alison Grimes, just took a big blow when his campaign manager, Jesse Benton, resigned today. Seems that back in 2012, when Benton worked for Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign, he was involved in getting Kent Sorenson, then an Iowa state Senator, to switch his endorsement from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul, a move which Sorenson, on pleading guilty to Federal bribery charges Wednesday, says the Paul campaign paid him $73,000 to make. (Benton, by the way, is married to Ron Paul’s granddaughter, Valori Pyeatt.)

— A town in West Virginia, where King Coal normally rules without question, has developed a useful funding model for converting to solar power.

McConnell specifically singled out the Senate Conservatives Fund — a group that has endorsed his Tea Party challenger, Matt Bevin, for the 2014 Republican nod in Kentucky’s Senate race. The incumbent McConnell told the Examiner that groups of that nature are “giving conservatism a bad name.”

“What they do is mislead their donors into believing the reason that we can’t get as good an outcome as we’d like to get is not because of a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president, but because Republicans are insufficiently committed to the cause — which is utter nonsense,” McConnell said.

McConnell is doing what he can, when he can, to avoid another shutdown. Here’s why:

Before the shutdown, McConnell and Boehner had Harry Reid and Obama and Pelosi pretty much where they’d wanted them. Sequestration was locked in for the rest of the decade. No pay increases for federal employees, no hope of bringing in new revenues, but cuts as far as the eye could see.

Why? Because the shutdown was, despite the media’s best efforts to pretend that “both sides” were at fault, known to be a Republican production from the get-go. It had been planned by the Republicans’ Suicide Caucus since last January, in fact. And the public rightly blamed them for it.

McConnell knows that Shutdown 2 will, if anything, be an even bigger disaster for the Republicans. The first one happened far enough away from the 2014 elections that with time, and with GOP/Media Complex demagoguing against the ACA rollout, its ill effects would be minimized if not totally countered. But Shutdown 2, including its runup, will happen in January and February of 2014 — right as Republicans will be wanting to get out and fundraise to fight off the Koch-funded Tea Party primary challengers allied with the Suicide Caucusers that gave us the first shutdown and are now jonesing for another one. Worse yet, the very problems with the Obamacare website that they hoped would lead them to victory in 2014 will have faded from the public mind, replaced by a growing number of stories like this one.

The bottom line personally for Mitch McConnell is this: He needs to stand up to the Suicide Caucus now, and try to get them to see reason on the second shutdown they want so fervently, or he not only loses his shot at taking the Senate, he likely loses his Senate seat to his Democratic challenger, Alison Grimes, come November.

The bottom line for the Republican agenda is this: If the Republicans force another shutdown next month, they will injure themselves so badly politically that when February rolls around they’ll be begging Harry Reid to end the sequester for them. Which Harry Reid will be perfectly happy to do.

As I noted yesterday, Harry Reid’s negotiating position for the upcoming budget conference and debt limit deals in January and February is rather strong because no sane Republican is going to want to go through another shutdown during an election year.

Right on cue, Mitch McConnell, who has spent far too much of his time trying to rein in freshman Tea Party twits like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, moves one more time to send the lads back to the kiddie table. Seems that idiots in both houses, including Cruz, are still hell-bent on inflicting more damage on the country and on the GOP by jonesing for another shutdown, and McConnell has stepped forward to shut them up:

The day after Congress voted to end the government shutdown, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared there would be no repeat of the shutdown that he didn’t want in the first place. “A government shutdown is off the table,” McConnell told The National Review. “We’re not going to do it.” In raising the debt limit and opening the government on Wednesday night, Congress set December 13 as the deadline for Democrats and Republicans to come to a budget agreement. Government funding runs out January 15. But those deadlines won’t bring another crisis, he said.

McConnell didn’t mention Sen. Ted Cruz, who led the shutdown-the-government-to-defund-Obamacare fight. In fact, when National Review‘s Robert Costa asked about Cruz, McConnell “had no comment–at all. Stone-faced.” But McConnell’s comments are pretty clear criticism of Cruz’s actions. “I think we have fully now acquainted our new members with what a losing strategy that is,” McConnell told The Hill. (Cruz was elected last year.)

The US Chamber of Commerce agrees, which is why they’re backing Boehner against any possible primary challengers and also investigating running primary candidates against the more obnoxious Tea Partiers in Congress.

Greg Dworkin and David “Kagro” Waldman, at around 32:00 into the “Kagro in the Morning” podcast this morning, bring up another reason why Shutdown 2: Electric Boogaloo won’t happen, namely that the events of the past month have made it clear that the GOP, especially in the House, is in the midst of a civil war that has done great damage to the party.

This is hilarious. Ashley Judd hasn’t even come close to openly stating she’d like to run against Mitch McConnell, yet the fact that she is within four points of him in two separate polls — one of them a Republican internal poll — has him panicking a full two years before the election:

Two weeks ago, Public Policy Polling found that McConnell, with an approval rating of just 37%, is the least popular senator in the nation. In a hypothetical match-up against actor Ashley Judd, the Republicans’ Senate leader was ahead by only four points, 47% to 43%.

Sen. Mitch McConnell is looking to knock Ashley Judd out of the Kentucky Senate race before she gets in.

The Senate Minority Leader’s campaign has leaked the results of a poll on some of Judd’s positions, saying it proves the Hollywood actress doesn’t pose a threat to his re-election if she decides to launch a campaign.

The polling showed that McConnell’s lead in a hypothetical matchup with Judd jumps from 4% to 20% once voters know more about her, according to a memo provided to Politico.

So, let me get this straight. PPP found McConnell leading Ashley Judd by only four points, 47% to 43%, leading the senator’s aides to allege a conspiracy. But when McConnell conducted his own poll through a Republican polling firm, he learned that his lead over Judd was … four points, 47% to 43%.

Hilarious as it is, McConnell is right to be worried. If the North Carolina Democrats had managed to talk Andy Griffith into running, he would have beaten Jesse Helms like a gong back in 1990, and very likely died as a United States Senator.

Mitch McConnell was given valuable Washington Post column space to argue for the further destruction of America’s industrial base and what’s left of America’s middle and working classes so that their jobs can be done overseas by people in horrific working conditions who risk being murdered if they try to improve them, all so Mitch’s already-phenomenally wealthy buddies in the Chamber of Commerce can get even richer off of the collective misery of people in the US and elsewhere.